Project 001: Tiered Skirt Variations

Let's explore how to draft a tiered skirt with 2 or 5 tiers.

Hello sew-friends! And welcome to all 935+ subscribers! It warms my heart that so many people have signed up to learn more about sewing and math and I hope that you've been enjoying this series so far. Today, I'm going to share some design variations on the tiers of the skirt.

Last week, I showed you how to draft a three-tiered skirt that has proportions of .75x, x and 1.5x. But there are infinitely many ways to design a tiered skirt. If you want to play around and design your own proportions, I found that sketching on lined paper and graph paper was an easy way to compare proportions of the tiers.

Today, I'm going to show you how to draft a two different two tier skirts and a five tier skirt. You can probably guess that the more tiers there are, the more complicated the math is. That said, this process is very similar to my last post, where I showed how to draft a three tier skirt. (In fact, calculating the width and length of the waistband pattern piece is the same for all variations and is covered in previous posts.)

Update 01/2025: This post is now archived for paid subscribers. If you are interested in this project but don’t want to subscribe, you can purchase a pdf version of this project in my shop.